Music has always been the reason I engage with physical media. Listening comes first. Every record tells a story, and the best jazz detectives follow every clue to get closer to the truth contained in its grooves. That means reading the authoritative liner notes on the back sleeve, studying the front cover, and paying attention to every visual detail that accompanies the music.
When I fell in love with collecting records, I trained my eye as carefully as my ears. I became fascinated by the yellow-and-black fireworks labels of Prestige Records, designed by Leo Sharper. Whether the label carried the 44 West 50th Street address in New York or the later Bergenfield, New Jersey address mattered; it helped establish provenance. I wanted originals.
I examined the smooth runout groove beyond the label, where the music ends and the evidence begins. The stamped or etched initials "RVG" in the deadwax told me that Rudy Van Gelder had mastered the record in my hands.
Design matters. It invites you into the object hidden inside 12 inches of cardboard and opens the door to discovery before the needle ever touches the groove. That’s why I was excited to speak with Mark Havens and Chris Entwisle about their remarkable book, Wail: The Visual Language of Prestige Records, published last fall by RIT Press.
Our conversation, below, was lightly edited for space and clarity. Thanks to the authors for providing images from the book. Tune in to the Friday Mixtape this week, on July 17 from 6 to 10 p.m., to hear a selection of music that ties in with this conversation.
Josh Jackson: Tell me about the origins of Wail. How did the two of you team up together to collaborate on this book?
Mark Havens: Chris and I found each other through a mutual love of the music. Because I have a background in design, and Chris has a background in design, we gravitated toward the visuals just about as much as the music. I mean, it was an equal level of interest in both, and so when we would get together and talk, we’d talk about the covers just as much as the music itself.
One of the things we noticed was that so many of the albums whose visuals we really respected and enjoyed were Prestige albums, and that there was really nothing out there that explored that work for the label. So we started working on this book to be a very humble compendium of album covers. Then we began to see the names of these individuals in a small corner of an album cover somewhere, and we said, “Well, who’s Tom Hannan?” Or, “Who’s Bob Parent?” We started to look into who these individuals were, and at that time several of them were still with us. We thought maybe we’d be able to get in touch with these folks, and that expanded the book from a compendium of album covers to this sort of design history with an oral history embedded about the creation of these albums, the creative process of each of these individuals in their own words.
I’ve been a deep listener for many years, but it took me a while to appreciate the visual aspects of album covers. I’ve come to recognize them as real cultural artifacts, and also the result of a commercial product. Covers are meant to attract the eye of somebody in a record store, in the same way that Bob Weinstock himself had been attracted by record covers at the Commodore Music Shop in New York as a kid.
The interesting thing about Prestige is I feel like it suffered from a branding issue. It didn’t have the kind of consistency of designers like Alex Steinweiss at Columbia Records, David Stone Martin at Verve, or Reid Miles at Blue Note (who also designed for Prestige). It was a scrappy little operation, but like the music, it was messy at times and occasionally very brilliant.
Chris Entwisle: Your analysis of where labels were at that time is really accurate. This was something that we recognized in looking at Prestige. We thought it was always characterized as an also-ran next to Blue Note, so that the covers were more scrappy, the covers were less unified in a way — but if you really look at it from a design aspect, I think Blue Note always had a kind of idea toward marketing, but what distinguished those 1950s covers were equally the Francis Wolff photographs, and the way Reid Miles was cropping them. So, you could look at a Blue Note and Prestige album that are directly contemporary, and the Prestige one would look… far less studied.
But there was a lot going on, and I think the designers appreciated the fact that both Tom Hannan and Reid Miles were doing work for Blue Note and Prestige, literally back-to-back. The albums were coming out at the same time, the designs were happening at the same time. But I think Weinstock was kind of an omnivore. He was into all different kinds of music — far more varied than what Blue Note was doing by the mid-‘50s. I don’t see Blue Note signing Moondog, or doing a Gil Evans album, or Lennie Tristano early on, or Lee Konitz. I think he just had his ears open and his eyes open, he saw what other labels were doing, and I think he really just wanted to really do as much as he could, just to get as much out there as he could.
We have to remember that these are kids, you know? These are very young adults. Bob Weinstock was a teenager when he started what was New Jazz at the time, before it was Prestige. It just seems like this very unusual circumstance, not unlike a bandstand, where it’s like: you’ve got talent, come over here and prove it. Do you guys get a sense that that is sort of the unifying directive?
Havens: I think it’s the common thread through just about everything with Prestige, just because it seems like everything else was kind of a moving target. I mean, we heard from a number of the artists and designers who said it was an open door at the Prestige office. Don Schlitten remembers Leo Sharper coming in. They remember Tom Hannan coming in. Bob Weinstock says Hannan just walked in one day and said, “Hey, I’m an art director,” and had his portfolio with him. Dan Morgenstern was really insightful about this. He said “Look, everything was sort of on a shoestring. It was run like a mom-and-pop store.” So there wasn’t fame to be gotten. There was no money to be made. It was just: do you love doing this? Do you love the music? Do you love making imagery? Do you love design? You can have an open door, but you have no idea who’s gonna come through the open door. Weinstock had an incredible number of supremely talented people walk through that door, because the only reason you’d walk through the door was the love of doing it.
We mentioned Leo Sharper earlier, and the very famous early design of the label itself, the fireworks label, is something that he created. He also did the album cover for New Directions. While Don Schlitten had done some really admirable early work for Prestige to get it away from what were boring covers on those early 10-inch records, I feel like you’re making the case that great design at Prestige started with Leo.
Entwisle: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I think that was a conscious decision. When you read the liner notes by Ira Gitler on those two 10-inch Teddy Charles records, Gitler actually calls this a visual representation of jazz, or a kind of transmutation of the music. And those covers don’t look much like what was to follow. They look unique, which goes a little bit to what you were saying earlier about branding. But I think that’s part of the power of some of these things, is that it went in so many different directions that any single one of them could have dictated where they went for the next couple years. So you’re probably right that the consumer, even when LPs were in their infancy, probably couldn’t distinguish, “This is a Blue Note, This is Riverside, this is Prestige.” I think it becomes clear in retrospect, and part of what makes Prestige distinctive is the kind of variety of things that they were doing.
I want to talk about David X. Young. He’s a really interesting figure not only because of his album cover artwork, but he was really influential in the loft jazz scene. He had a loft on West 28th Street, and that whole scene became legendary and very well documented.
You include his response to a Nat Hentoff article in DownBeat where he talks about designer David Stone Martin of Verve Records, but also the designer Burt Goldblatt. He says: “The cover designer has an unusual opportunity for free expression within certain ethical and aesthetic bounds. The nature of album cover art, however, is primarily interpretive rather than purely creative.”
Entwisle: We thought how fortuitous it was that we actually found something where he articulated an actual philosophy behind what went into an album cover, and what that had to do with the music. And I think David X. Young in particular was a really fascinating character because he, like Tom Hannan, was very much in the fine art world as an Abstract Expressionist painter, and those guys were real purists when it came to the idea of commercial art. I think that Young wrote something that was kind of an apologia for why you would do that, and for his reason for doing it, because he really didn't do any other commercial art.
You mentioned Burt Goldblatt, which I think it’s interesting that Burt Goldblatt and David Stone Martin are seen in that period in 1953 as being people that had an identity as designers. At this point, people do remember David Stone Martin, but Burt Goldblatt is kind of lost. He even did a Prestige cover, but he’s kind of lost to the mist of time, or whatever that phrase is.
Well, let me get to the David X. Young quote at this point. Excellent segue opportunity. “Goldblatt’s work is relatively adequate commercial album cover design, but please don’t call it creative art. This comparison resembles one of, say, Liberace and Tatum, David Stone Martin being Art Tatum, and Goldblatt being Liberace.”
Entwisle: Yeah, he was very perceptive, I think.
Some of these album covers remain striking 70 years later. Take Mobley’s Message, where Tom Hannan adapted a rather generic photograph of power lines, or the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Concorde, which uses a French tourism photo. What makes these designs art, rather than simply packaging?
Entwisle: Obviously there’s a range of quality, and there’s a range of intent. I think Bob Parent became a master photographer and an art photographer. But his forte really wasn’t design, so I think something like the Concorde cover is kind of interesting to see him doing some hand lettering, just to see how these guys were looking at commercial art, and how they were thinking of how things would be reproduced. In Mobley's Message, the power lines — that to me is one of the strongest Prestige covers, so for me, that’s art. Graphic design can be regarded as art, I think that's art, and I think that’s a question of the type, the image, and the cropping, and all of it coming together as a composition. I think Tom Hannan was really a master of doing that.
Gil Mellé was a recording artist and a designer for Prestige. I don't think that he designed any of his own records, but he did design one of my favorite albums on Prestige, Tadd Dameron’s Fontainebleau. Looking beyond his musicianship, what are your thoughts on Gil Mellé as a visual artist?
Havens: Some covers you look at for Prestige, and it just looks like they were born there. The way the type is placed, and the way that the photograph is, or the illustration is, they just look of a piece. But the thing about Gil that we kept coming back to was that there was so much evidence of process in what ended up being the final album cover. I’m thinking of a couple of those Sonny Rollins albums that he did that are just these sort of explosions of Ben-Day and hand-lettered text, and you could see the pen strokes, and the way in which the color is laid on, and all of the different tints, and it’s almost like you could see him still doing it. You could see him actually there in the album itself. I think the thing that stood out to us about Gil was that it seemed like they were still mid-process. Not unfinished, but there was so much evidence of how he did what he did, almost stream-of-consciousness, the way that things are layered on top of each other. You could see the wheels turning on the album, in the image itself, which was just fascinating to us.
Photographer Scott Hyde, who also contributed to Prestige, said that he wanted to take virtual images, things you can’t see. How does one do that with either photography or graphic design?
Havens: Scott Hyde was incredible as far as the recollections that he had. He talks about being a fine art photographer and expressing himself through that medium, but having absolutely nowhere to show that work; he said his photography was not seen as art at that time. When the opportunity came for him to do these albums with Tom Hannan, he delved into what he was exploring at that point, which were these sort of time-lapse exposures, where he would put a light source over a tray, a photographic tray, darkroom tray of moving water, and through these long exposures and various ways of agitating the water. He talks about sort of tapping it, he talks about vibrating it with a scalp vibrator that he bought at a second-hand store. All of these different ways in which he could get these set-up patterns of standing waves. Through the lens over time, he was able to get these patterns, and that was an absolute long-term artistic pursuit for him. And, he said, you know, at that point in the ‘50s, one of the few places that he could have the public see his work was on these Prestige album covers, and thankfully, Tom Hannan was open to utilizing this work of Hyde’s, and they did some wonderful collaborations together on Prestige album covers.
Yeah, one that I love is The Prestige All-Stars All Night Long. With that watery approach that you’re talking about, that treatment.
Havens: We have the actual photographic print that was used to make the album, in the book, across from the All Night Long album, but it’s just black and white. And I feel like when you look at it in black and white, in that print, it certainly doesn’t have the power of the final, finished album cover. They were given the title of the album cover, and given a concept based on this. The color that Hannan chose to use for that piece of art on that album cover just speaks to nighttime in a way that I don't think any other color could. I mean, these guys truly collaborated together, right? The photography isn’t anything without the design and the other way around. It was just a really great collaboration, and I think the power of Hyde’s image is, it just takes a quantum leap in the colors that Tom decided to do the final album cover, and it just adds so much to that sort of nighttime, wet pavement, rainy streets kind of feel that All Night Long has to me when I take a look at it.
I want to talk about Reid Miles and Esmond Edwards. These are the two that you leave to the end. Reid Miles did so much of his work for Blue Note Records, but he did a number of beautiful album covers for Prestige, including the Frank Wess album you use for the cover of this book. He had a really unique art. Some of those beautiful sketches, I don’t even know how to describe them, like Olio and those things, those are really gorgeous. Is there a distinction between Reid’s work for Prestige and his work for Blue Note?
Entwisle: I think you could see his sense of composition and his boldness in what he did even from the earliest Blue Notes, when he was working with John Hermansader. What made those Blue Note records so identifiable from the beginning was the use of really audacious cropping of Francis Wolff session photos.
By necessity, he admitted.
Entwisle: Right. And then combined with type. When I was first into the music, and I would see those Blue Note covers, I knew exactly what they were. Without overstating it, he was given complete freedom at Prestige, so he would do things like, the Monk cover, where he’s breaking up the single-syllable words, and using the type as art, as he says. So I think the two things that you see are him at Blue Note working with certain kinds of restrictions, or certain constraints, and at Prestige, where he’s just completely free to do what he wants. So you’re looking at two different angles of something, and I think you can distinguish those covers even if you saw them in a record store in 1958. I think you could sort of see an identity.
Finally, I do want to talk about Esmond Edwards. First of all, with Leo Sharper and Esmond Edwards, it’s already an incredibly rare thing to have two Black Americans working in this space, and yet, they are even closer to the music. When I think about the photographs that Esmond Edwards takes, I think a lot about the ones that Milt Hinton took with his Leica. Like Hinton, Edmonds was close to the musicians and had the ability to capture intimacy. I feel like his contributions are terribly under-recognized in the recording industry. He became a great session producer at Prestige, but his overall artistry really does get a spotlight here.
Havens: I feel like Esmond is sort of the culmination of everything. I feel like he’s this distillation of Tom Hannan’s work, of Reid Miles’ work, and then he brings his own sort of stark cinematic quality to all of it, and his just immense talent and bravery to jump into so many areas. He was the only person at Prestige who, all at the same time, was a photographer, an illustrator, a graphic designer, and a producer. He was self-taught as far as photography, and he was also self-taught as far as graphic design. He talks about fishing out Tom Hannan’s old pay stubs from the Prestige offices, and Reid Miles’ old pay stubs, and getting catalogs from the type foundries in New York, and staying up till 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning trying to figure out exactly how to do this. And so, it’s almost like Prestige designs informed by Prestige designs, right? With the unique take on them that only Esmond had, because even before he was a graphic designer, he had just this sort of very graphic quality to his photographs when he was doing only photography. His photography itself was just so intrinsically graphic. When all of those elements came together, man, it was the closest thing that Prestige ever got to this sort of clarified house style.
I feel like it’s safe to say that American graphic design during the ‘50s and ‘60s was deeply influenced by European modernism. After immersing yourselves in this work, do you also see something distinctly American in Prestige’s visual language? If so, what is it?
Havens: I absolutely think that it’s uniquely American in its — and I might be getting a little too sentimental here — [ideal of] “do your best with what you’ve got.” And the idea that limitations on a particular project or a particular situation can actually be used as building blocks for strong work, right? I mean, just about every designer says there was no money in this. At various times, there was no money to do multiple colors. There was no money to get a type house, a type foundry involved. There was no money to pay photographers. But you see all of these limitations. I completely see that Prestige was run on a shoestring, but that never limited these designers from producing just incredibly strong work, and it seems like they used the limitations to make the work better.
Entwisle: All of that’s true, and I agree with Mark. To say whether it’s uniquely American: they were obviously influenced by typography movements and other design movements, but it’s also important to point out that Tom Hannan and David X. Young were part of the fine art world, and this was right after the wars, when New York became the capital of the art world, with Abstract Expressionism. I think those guys, along with the music, makes it uniquely New York and uniquely American.
Wail: The Visual Language of Prestige Records is available now from RIT Press.
